A judge has ruled that a woman charged with leaking secrets to a reporter will remain jailed until her trial after prosecutors argued that she might possess more stolen intelligence and could try to flee the country.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Brian Epps denied bond Thursday for 25-year-old Reality Winner. Prosecutor Jennifer Solari says investigators seized a notebook from Winner’s house in Augusta, Georgia, and in it, Winner made references about traveling to the Middle East. At one point she wrote, “I want to burn the White House down … find somewhere in Kurdistan to live. Haha.”
Winner worked for a U.S. government contractor in Augusta. She is a former Air Force linguist who speaks Farsi and Arabic. Prosecutors don’t think Winner is a jihadist or terrorist sympathizer, they say that before she left the military, she inserted an external hard drive into a top-secret computer there. They say they don’t know what happened to it or what it might contain.
Winner’s attorney says she should be released and prosecutors are exaggerating the threat she poses.
